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MA Fine Art Show

Publication: a-n magazineWritten by: Dr Stephen Riley

‘Sarah Misselbrook, from the UK, created a striking installation of school desks in various sizes and stages of order and disarray, arranged alongside plaster cast shoulder blades which similarly changed from regimented order to chaos. Sarah described the installation, Conformation, as an expression of the constraints of conformity and of breaking away. Another of her works, Chaste, expressed the inaccessibility of knowledge and consisted of an entire collection of the Encyclopaedia Britannica chained in a circle, bound with metal bolts and featuring intricate cut-outs in the pages of one of the volumes.’

‘You approach Sarah Misselbrook’s piece ‘Conformation’ via a line of what might be cherub wings, which lead into a nightmare classroom of distended and smashed desks. As the title indicates, this work, like one of those dreams in which you get your own back, rails against the oppressiveness of a catholic education. Nearby, the same artist has a video, viewed furtively through key-holes, in which a character tortuously assembles communion wafers into the letters of a cry for help.’ A review by Dr Stephen Riley.